The Master: Scientologists Aren't the Only Crazy Ones

TORONTO — If you've heard of The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest film showing here at the Toronto International Film Festival, you've probably heard about it as the scientology movie. The Master comes on the heels of a bunch of recent scientology scandals — accusations of abuse in the movement, reports of auditions for Tom Cruise's wife, and so on. Scientologists cannot be happy about The Master, which, it turns out, is a thinly veiled account of the life of their founder, L. Ron Hubbard. But it would be a mistake to see this film as simply an assault on Scientology. It's much more than that, with much wider implications. The Master is a perfectly articulated, perfectly plotted, perfectly acted depiction of the origin of a religion. As such, it's far more flattering to Scientology than it could be. And much more damaging to the vast majority who practice mainstream religion or no religion at all.

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There are two intersecting stories in The Master: The first is that of Freddie Quell, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who finds his soul in ruins at the end of the Second World War. He'll drink scotch if it's available, but he prefers paint thinner muddled with lime. He masturbates into the ocean in front of his fellow sailors. He starts fights with customers at his job as a store photographer. He's the kind of guy who finds himself run off the farm when he takes a job harvesting cabbages. He himself can't tell if he's a fuckup or legitimately mentally ill.

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At this point in his disintegrating life, Quell encounters Lancaster Dodd, author and founder of the Cause. By following Dodd, as he wanders between the houses of his acolytes, composes his books, lectures and practices, we see in detail how a new religion emerges. There are recreations of the famous screening process, whereby the master compiles a dossier on each prospective member of the religion, learning and recording their deepest secrets. "Have you ever had sex with a member of your family?" he asks. There is the insane cosmology. Past lives, aliens, trillions of years. There is the cult of personality based around a charismatic leader. At one point, Dodd sings a terrible old English ballad, badly, while all the women at the party take their clothes off. People who question the Cause in public are beaten up. When a follower doubts the quality of the second book, he's beaten up, too.

Yet for all this, the Cause without question helps Freddie Quell. A series of spiritual practices, which Dodd calls "applications," turn his life around. Quell sits with another follower for one minute without responding to anything at all that is said to him. He goes back and forth from a wall to a window describing each in more and more elaborate metaphors and visions. He finds order in his life through the Cause. At the beginning of the film, we see him fucking a woman made out of sand on a South Pacific beach. By the end, he manages to have a real encounter with a real woman. He has progressed.

He is saved. Which means the nagging question of The Master is how does the Cause really differ from any other religion? True, the views of Scientologists seem insane to the rest of us. South Park gave us a neat summary. It's all very well and good to snicker over the story, but we should remember that Mitt Romney, who is neither insane nor evil, wears sacred underwear and believes that you get your own planet after you die. Nearly a billion people on earth believe that when a priest hands them a cracker with a little wine it turns into the real body and blood of a carpenter who's been dead for two thousand years. The Jews think that the universe has a lord, and that this lord made a contract with one of their ancestors. None of these socially acceptable visions makes any more sense than aliens and volcanoes and past lives. The Cause contains the same core vision of all the major religions: that we are fallen and need to be redeemed. In Dodd's terms, it's about finding "the state of perfect" rather than being "a silly animal."

Near the end of the film, Quell decides to leave the movement, to become free from his master, despite the fact that both have rescued him. In the final scene, Quell's wife says to her husband's protégé, "You just can't take the world straight, can you?" The line is laced with irony, because for her "the world straight" is the world of past lives and applications and her husband's weird vision of the universe. It's a question for the audience, too, though: Who among us can actually take the world straight? The answer is nobody. All of us are crooked. The contradiction at the end of Anderson's film is exhilarating in its consequences: When we need to believe in something to be redeemed, but all the beliefs are monstrous lies, how are we supposed to save ourselves?